在第一次世界大戰之後，英國為了要恢復戰後時期的社會秩序與安定，母職於是被高度地推崇與鼓勵。理想母親的形象被重塑。不管是政府政策、法令規定，還是如雜誌等的媒體都聯合起來協同塑造此一理想的母親形象。

珍．瑞絲 (Jean Rhys) 和伊莉莎白．鮑文 (Elizabeth Bowen) 這兩位小說家對於母職和母子關係的相關議題皆是很是關注。在她們的小說中，珍．瑞絲與伊莉莎白．鮑文藉由揭露了以下的事實，來使母職此概念更加有深度與複雜： 這些事實包括了，不是每位女性都適合當母親、矛盾情感在母職中佔有重要的一席之地、現實中存在著不同模式的母職。這些事實在在都指向主流母職意識型態不只是有問題，而且僅僅是個迷思。透過分析珍．瑞絲與伊莉莎白．鮑文在文本中所揭示出的母職此概念，激發讀者注意到兩次世界大戰之間的時期之母職意識型態的不可能性、排外特性和對母子關係的負面影響。珍．瑞絲與伊莉莎白．鮑文使讀者注意到此母職意識型態中被隱藏起來或未言說的部份。

艾德麗安．里奇 (Adrienne Rich)、潔西卡．本傑明 (Jessica Benjamin) 和羅茲辛卡．帕克 (Rozsika Parker) 所提出關於母職中的矛盾情感和母子關係的相關概念可作為分析與檢驗珍．瑞絲與伊莉莎白．鮑文的小說的啓門之鑰。里奇提出的概念中，把母職分為女性的親身經驗和一種規訓母親的制度。本傑明則是提出“互為主體性” (intersubjectivity) 的概念。而帕克受到前面二位學者的啟發，她定義了母職中的矛盾情感，且把此矛盾情感轉為富有創造力的角色。

在此論文中，我試著運用此三位女性主義理論家的理論來論證，珍．瑞絲與伊莉莎白．鮑文，有別於她們的文學前輩，在兩次世界大戰之間時期的英國，極度推崇完美卻充滿霸權色彩、僵化與不切實際的母親形象的背景下，於她們小說中，率先闡明母子關係中的矛盾情感與提出母職的多種樣貌。

To maintain social order and stability during the inter-war period in Britain, motherhood was highly promoted. The image of the ideal mother was reconstructed, and governmental politics, legitimate laws, and media such as magazines were all allied to valorize and help construct the ideology of motherhood.

Jean Rhys in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Elizabeth Bowen in The House in Paris (1935) share common concerns about motherhood and mother-child relationships. In their novels, Rhys and Bowen complicate the concept of motherhood by exploring the facts that not every woman is suited to be a mother, that ambivalence is a crucial element in motherhood, and that various models of motherhood exist, all of which point to the ideology of motherhood being merely a “myth.” The exploration of these writers and the concept of motherhood draws attention to the ideology of motherhood in the inter-war years, that is, its impossibility, exclusiveness, and detrimental effects on mothers and their children. The writers cause readers to pay close attention to the unspoken part hidden in the ideology of motherhood. The writers also demonstrate how those women who choose not to be mothers are oppressed and marginalized and how they react.

The theories of Adrienne Rich, Jessica Benjamin, and Rozsika Parker, in terms of maternal ambivalence and the mother-child relationship, work as a doorstep to examine and analyze Rhys’s and Bowen’s novels. While Rich explicitly distinguishes the motherhood of women’s lived experiences from the institution of motherhood, and while Benjamin emphasizes the concept of “intersubjectivity” in the mother-child relationship, Parker redefines maternal ambivalence and turns it into a “creative role.” Incorporating the theories of Adrienne Rich, Jessica Benjamin, and Rozsika Parker, I argue that, unlike their predecessors, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen foreground the ambivalence of the mother-child relationship in their novels and provide alternatives of motherhood against the backdrop of the idealized, hegemonic, and rigid maternal image in the mainstream ideology of motherhood in inter-war Britain.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
Chinese Abstract vi
English Abstract vii
I.Chapter 1 Introduction 1
II.Chapter 2 The Ambivalence of Motherhood 19
A.Theories on Maternal Ambivalence 19
B.Home Sweet Home?: “The Angel in the House” or a
Warden in Prison? 28
C.Alternative Home: Aunt Violet’s House in Rushbrook,
Cork, Ireland 53
D.The Domineering Matriarch or the Desperate Mother?:
Gender Segregation, Power, and Motherhood 68
E.To Love or Not to Love? That is the Question:
Maternal Ambivalence in Karen Forrestier 90
III.Chapter 3 The Multiplicity of Motherhood 111
A.Gender Segregation and Inequality: Motherhood and
Domesticity 112
1.The Widowed Motherhood 113
2.The Reproduction of Motherhood and Its Oppression 119
3.The Bereaved Motherhood and the Ritual of Mourning 142
B.The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy as a Method of Social
Control over Women 165
1.Julia Martin’s Relationships with Men 166
2.A “Whore” Sojourning Hotels and Boarding Houses 204
IV.Chapter 4 Conclusion 218
Works Cited 223

Works Cited

Allen, Ann Taylor. “The Double Burden: Marriage, Motherhood, and Employment in the Interwar Years.” Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 137-59.
Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Armstrong, Tim. “Mapping Modernism.” Modernism. Polity, 2005. 23-46.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Penguin Books, 1994.
Beddoe, Deirdre. Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars, 1918-1939. Pandora, 1989.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon, 1988.
Berry, Betsy. “‘Between Dog and Wolf’: Jean Rhys’s Version of Naturalism in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.” Studies in the Novel 27.4 (1995): 544-62.
Blodgett, Harriet. “The Necessary Child: The House in Paris.” Modern Critical Views: Elizabeth Bowen. Chelsea House, 1987. 63-79.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Pictures and Conversations. Allen Lane, 1975.
---. The House in Paris. 1935. Anchor, 2002.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Penguin, 1994.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Penguin, 1965.
Brooke, Jocelyn. Elizabeth Bowen. Longmans, 1952.
Brown, Spencer Curtis. “Foreword.” Pictures and Conversations, by Elizabeth Bowen. Allen Lane, 1975. vii-xlii.
Carr, Helen. “Jean Rhys and Her Critics.” Jean Rhys. Northcote House, 1996. 1-10.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. California UP, 1978.
Coates, John. Social Discontinuity in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen: The Conservative Quest. Edwin Mellen, 1998.
Colesworthy, Rebecca. “Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.2 (2014): 92-108.
Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford UP, 2004.
Darwood, Nicola. “‘The Crack across the Crust of Life’: The House in Paris.” A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Cambridge Scholars, 2012. 81-109.
Dell’Amico, Carol. Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys. Routledge, 2005.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Penguin, 1994.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871-1872. Penguin, 1994.
Ellmann Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page. Edinburgh UP, 2003.
Emery, Mary Lou. “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie: Repetition and Counterromance.” Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile. Texas UP, 1990. 122-43.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1979.
Frickey, Pierrette. Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Three Continents, 1990.
Gallez, Paula Le. “Julia and ‘Others’.” The Rhys Woman. Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. 54-81.
Gildersleeve, Jessica. “Remains: The House in Paris and Friends and Relations.” Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival. Rodopi, 2014. 49-70.
Gindin, James. “Houses and Cultural Betrayal in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction.” British Fiction in the 1930s: The Dispiriting Decade. St. Martin’s, 1992. 108-32.
Glendinning, Victoria. “Gardens and Gardening.” Elizabeth Bowen Remembered: The Farahy Addresses, edited by Eibhear Walshe. Four Courts, 1998. 28-34.
Gregg, Veronica Marie. “The 1920s and 1930s: The Enigma of the Creole in Europe.” Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. North Carolina UP, 1995. 144-53.
Hanson, Clare. “Elizabeth Bowen: ‘Becoming-Woman’.” Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth Century. Macmillan Press, 2000. 48-73.
Heath, William. “Innocence and Experience.” Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction to Her Novels. Wisconsin UP, 1961. 71-102.
Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Humble, Nicola. “‘Not Our Sort’: The Re-Formation of Middle-Class Identities.” The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford UP, 2001. 57-107.
Johnson, Allan G. The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Temple UP, 2014.
Kenney, Edwin J. Elizabeth Bowen. Bucknell UP, 1975. 40-76.
Kent, Susan Kingsley. Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Inter-war Britain. Princeton UP, 1993.
Kloepfer, Deborah Kelly. “Orestes’ Sisters.” The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. Cornell UP, 1989. 46-62.
Lassner, Phyllis. Women Writers: Elizabeth Bowen. Macmillan, 1990.
Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. Vision, 1981.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991.
Lewis, Pericles. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge, 2007. 1-34.
Maurel, Sylvie. “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie: ‘Between Dog and Wolf.’” Jean Rhys. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. 27-50.
Mullholland, Terri. “Introduction: Reading the Single Room in the British Boarding House.” British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women’s Literature: Alternative Domestic Spaces. Routledge, 2017. 1-21.
Parker, Rozsika. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Virago, 2005.
Pedersen, Susan. “The Impact of the Great War.” Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945. Cambridge UP, 1993. 79-133.
“Response to Parents After the Loss of a Baby.” Infant Loss Resources. http://infantlossresources.org/?page_id=878. Accessed 27 December 2019.
Rhys Jean. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. 1931. Norton, 1997.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. Norton, 1995.
Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge UP, 1998.
Simpson, Anne B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Smith, Harold L. “British Feminism in the 1920s.” British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Massachusetts UP, 1990. 47-65.
Subzposh, Huma Javed. The Disintegrating Psyche: An Analysis of Jean Rhys’s Marginalized Heroines. Classical Publishing Company, 2003.
Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Pairs and The Death of the Heart.” Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Susan Osborn. Cork UP, 2009. 61-82.
Thackeray, William. Vanity Fair. 1847-1848. Oxford UP, 1983.
Thomas, Sue. The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Greenwood Press, 1999.
Walshe, Eibhear. “A Time for Hard Writers.” Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Eibhear Walshe. Irish Academic Press, 2009. 95-109.
Wheeler, Kathleen. A Critical Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists. Blackwell, 1997.
Wood, Alice. “Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home.” Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939. Edinburgh UP, 2018. 210-24.
Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt Brace, 1942. 235-42.
---. The World’s Classics: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford UP, 1992.
Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly. Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-66. Penguin, 1985.
Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford UP, 2005.